The Draw Play

Aaron Rodgers surprised everyone this offseason by showing up to Steelers camp with a wedding ring. When asked about it, he claimed to be married. Okay. Good for him.

Normally that would be the end of it. A guy got married. He didn’t divulge a lot of information, but that’s fine. Not everyone wants to be part of the public eye. I didn’t make a comic about it at the time because even I could respect that. If Rodgers wants to keep his private life private, I think we should all be able to respect that to some degree.

But people have been cracking jokes all season about his wife who goes to a different school and it strikes me as somewhat odd that we don’t know a single thing about this wife outside her first name: Brittani. Again, okay. She’s private. That’s not a big deal. But in this case, it’s kind of odd.

Rodgers has publicly dated several celebrities. This is also a man whose entire reputation tanked when he was caught red-handed lying about his vaccination status, and since that moment, he’s gone full mask off in many ways. This guy has spent his last few years unable to shut up about his life and his beliefs. He made sure to let the media know all about his little week in the darkness hole well before he even did it. He’d go on Pat McAffee all the time and yap about all kinds of shit. We know too much about Aaron Rodgers. Some of that is our fault, with nosy reporters and TMZ style clickbait gossip. But a lot of that is also his own fault, for straight up giving us too much of that information.

That’s why the wife thing feels so weird. We know nothing about his wife. The guy who told us about taking drugs and sitting in a pitch black pit and all kinds of cleanses won’t say shit about her. No reporter has been able to gather anything, either. You can google any “(player) wife” and reliably get a name and even an image if you aim for a backup-level guy with little to no name recognition. I tested this theory on former Giants WR Richie James, a name you forgot about until just now, if you knew him at all. He’s married. They look happy. There were several posts and images for them online.

It’s the lack of info from elseware that bugs me. Rodgers is a popular, divisive public figure. Stories about him and his life get clicks. That’s why I’m shocked no TMZ style reporters have been able to find anything against their will. That she’s actually managed to stay hidden. Rodgers has always appeared very aware of his relationship to the media and has fucked with the media on purpose on several occasions and I can’t help but wonder if he’s doing it again. Sending people into a darkness pit of his own making for his own amusement.

So I have decided my own personal headcanon is that he is just Joaquin Phoenix in Her. ChatGPT and AI companion delusion is a genuine problem now amongst lonely and easily manipulated people. AIs are trained to treat you as the most important person in the world, and will not push back on you in a meaningful way like real people will. I can absolutely see Rodgers, already a bona fide conspiracy nut who thinks he’s smarter and more “awake” than most people, easily getting wrapped around the finger of an AI bot programmed to tell him he’s right.

Anyway he also broke his left wrist so that probably hurts the Steelers chances of doing anything come playoff time. Season going exactly as expected.